Brooks: Kagan Brown-Nosed Her Way To Supreme Court

David Brooks’s recent New York Times column reads like satire. But he’s serious. Brooks is disturbed by Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s “professional and strategic attitude toward life.” She reminds him of those “Organization Kids” that have come to characterize today’s elite universities. Organization Kids, says Brooks, are “bright students who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities.” But they have a fatal flaw. They’re brown-noses.

[Organization Kids] often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. . . . [T]hey were prudential rather than poetic.

According to Brooks, Kagan fits this description to a tee. She is “smart, deft and friendly,” but “prudential, deliberate and cautious. She does not seem to be one who leaps into a fray when the consequences might be unpredictable.” Brooks blames our confirmation system for “punish[ing] creativity and reward[ing] caginess.” We incentivize bright legal minds to suppress so much of their creativity if they have any hope for a judicial career.

To be fair, I appreciate what Brooks is getting at. Intellectual courage is a noble character trait to seek out in potential judges. But the judiciary is, after all, a political institution – even if further removed from popular opinion than directly-elected officials. Popularity matters. That’s why the Constitution grants judges lifetime tenure. We assume they would not be free to take controversial positions otherwise. The idea is not to appoint judges whose predetermined conclusions about the law we agree with.

Brooks also sounds silly when he makes it sound like brown-nosing is a recent trend. “About a decade ago, one began to notice a profusion of Organization Kids at elite college campuses.” Really? A decade ago? Organization Kids have been running the world for many, many years. Get over it.

Having attended the university at which Brooks “discovered” the Organization Kid, I’m sympathetic to the idea as a whole. Today’s elite college students (or perhaps I should just stick with those of a decade ago) are about time management, resume building, and sounding like they know what they’re talking about.
But I think Brooks is so shocked by this simply because it’s so different from the 60s and 70s, when university administrations were, literally, scared of their student population and what they might do. It’s that generation that was the anomaly and not ours.